I found a link to Foreskin Man on The Good Man Project. To respond fully will require a more careful reading than I can give the comic now, but even paging quickly through issue two reveals an awful lot that is problematic in the way the characters are drawn. The Good Man Project pointed to this image of the evil Jewish circumcisers:
But the depiction of women is also problematic:
The routine circumcision of infant boys, medical and otherwise, is a problem. Somehow I can’t see a comic like this being the way to address it.
Cross posted on The Poetry in The Politics and The Politics in The Poetry.
What an astonishingly stupid body of work.
MRA stuff being sexist and racist/anti-Semitic? Who knew.
The anti-Semitism in the second issue is so ridiculous I actually giggled at it.
In book three, Foreskin Man is arrested by the FBI for assault and kidnapping.
Awful stuff–I’m glad it was bad enough to be giggle inducing.
An island, “surrounded by San Diego’s famous beaches?”
The depiction of women isn’t so much problematic as deformed.
I dunno, Mandolin, every woman I’ve ever known looks just like that. Also, all my Jewish friends, and any health care workers who perform circumcisions, at least at times have blank white glowing eyes.
“Story and characters are fictional.”
Your female friends have tiny heads that jut precipitously away from their plumb lines, thus suggesting that their necks aren’t actually connected to their spines?
The blank eyes thing, though–well, yeah. I have blank eyes RIGHT NOW. :D
(Btw, I know Barry said routine male infant circumcision is a problem in the OP, but I wanted to second. I’ve been talking to people who’ve recently had infants… it’s very difficult to talk about, of course. My brother and sister did not have their second son circumcised. They said it was because they saw their first son’s circumcision and were unwilling to subject their second son to something so painful. I don’t really know what to do except try to consciousness raise on the subject, and that can be… tricky. It’s hard to strike the appropriate balance– “I think you are a good person, and whatever you do won’t shake my faith on that, BUT I think you should really examine the evidence on this if you haven’t, because your son’s bodily integrity is important.” People seem to want to assume that if you strongly morally object to something they choose to do, you think they’re evil. I don’t. I think they’re badly wrong.
FWIW, I do not think we benefit from treating bodily integrity as an absolute either, with all violations thereof being equal. Piercing an infant’s ears is minor, and not IMO worth regulating. Removal of the foreskin is significant and should not be permitted on minors. But it’s not as severe a clitoridectomy. And frankly, I really don’t think clitorodectomy should be discussed as if it’s the same thing as even more severe procedures such as infibulation (which often include clitorodectomy) which don’t only involve surgical risk and compromise or eliminate sexual pleasure, but also cause severe ongoing health risks. I don’t think absolutism gains us anything; if procedures, including the ones I disapprove of, can be transferred to hospitals, then they should be transferred to hospitals. If outlawing male infant circumcision in hospitals would cause a significant black market of unsafe procedures and uptick in deaths, as outlawing female genital surgeries has done, then I would change my opinion about its legality. (I do not know of any research that suggests it would; then again, I don’t know of any that suggests it wouldn’t.) Saving lives is the first priority.
A lot of what I’ve seen of the anti-male-circumcision movement seems to be very interested in absolutism, collapsing the difference between infibulation, clitorodectomy, foreskin removal, and genital knicking (the last of which being, as far as I know, something that really shouldn’t require legal intervetion), and suggesting that female genital surgeries consist primarily of the last two categories (removal of the clitoral prepuce or clitoral knicking) which just isn’t true. I’ve also seen a lot of advocacy for policies which would work against harm reduction by requiring that all bodily integrity arguments be collapsed or that no legislation be done to mitigate the more severe harms unless it also mitigates the less severe harms.
I wish that wasn’t true, because mutilating infants is an important thing to stop. It shouldn’t just be a pawn in people’s anti-feminist vendettas.)
Your female friends have tiny heads that jut precipitously away from their plumb lines, thus suggesting that their necks aren’t actually connected to their spines?
Exactly. That, and balloon-like pontoons.
BTW, RJN posted this, not Barry. I did the same thing. Comic = Barry.
I for one find the right for bodily integrity for any non-consenting persons to be absolute. That and the irreversibility is my baseline objection against both FGM and MGM. Intent or even scale does not alter this baseline. Although it is reversible I am also against ear piercings on infants – it is unecessary pain willfully inflicted upon someone who can’t consent nor defend themselves for no good reasons (making an infant look cuter/prettier is not by far a good reason).
What I find damaging about the insistence on keeping FGM and MGM as separate issues which are in no way comparable is that it allows for people to be hypocrites on this issue: decrying FGM while at the same time declaring that they would circumcise their sons or that an uncircumcised penis is unattractive (both are examples from post and comment on another feminist blog).
Mandolin:
This can be read as a support for the luckily rescinded position of AAP which raised the idea of legalizing a less-severe ritual cutting — akin, the policy statement says, to an “ear piercing” — to dissuade parents from sending their daughters to be circumcised in their home country. Perhaps you would like to clarify if that what you meant?
From the article I linked to:
However, for AAP to say about male infant circumcision:
is by and large not seen as “shocking lack of understanding of a boy’s fundamental right to bodily integrity and equality”.
Edited to close a blockquote which I left open by mistake
I support genital nicking as a replacement for genital circumcision. It’s worked in places like Indonesia to reduce the incidence of more invasive surgeries. I don’t have a position on the US recommendation because I am unfamiliar with research that indicates whether it would have a similar effect in the United States. If it would, then I’m certainly in favor of it.
Alternatives, such as outlawing female genital surgeries entirely–which were undertaken in much of colonially occupied Afrida–ended up making the surgeries more radical, implementing them in more dangerous and painful ways, spreading them to groups that did not practice female genital surgeries before imperialism, and (in some places) complicating their effect on women’s bodies by driving the hidden surgeries to be done on younger and younger victims, which has been demonstrated to be worse for women’s sexual function.
The belief that it’s appropriate to sacrifice young girls’ lives in the service of taking an absolute stand against female genital surgeries is abhorrent to me. Those solutions have been tried; they made the problem worse. Persisting in the belief that solutions that don’t work, and actually make the problems worse, will actually solve them is delusional. It’s much like teaching abstinence only education so that teenagers won’t get pregnant when we know that the opposite effect occurs.
We have demonstrable examples of what works to lessen attachment to female genital surgeries in some African countries, and it involves letting local activists take the lead. Generally, the surgeries provide some symbolic benefit to the community; in some cases, the symbol can be changed. Clitorodectomy can become clitoral nicking, or be replaced with some other kind of ritual or object.
Education is the other panacea. As education levels increase, and as women’s ability to be financially independent increases, female genital surgeries decline.
Give women education. Give them resources. Listen to local activists.
But don’t just take a culture that’s strongly attached to the process and drive it underground. That kills girls. It doesn’t even appreciably lower the circumcision rate which, last time I was looking into this stuff, was still over 96% in one of the countries which uses the fact that the procedure is technically illegal to attempt to improve their human rights standing with the U.S.
Harm reduction is more important than absolutism.
The other reason it’s important NOT to talk about these cultural phenomena as if they are all the same thing is that they are practiced for different reasons. Infibulation is heavily associated with regions that have strong traditions of patriarchal inheritance; where there is less tradition of property, female genital surgeries tend to take different forms. So what works on clitorodectomy may not work on infibulation; what works in one region may not work in another; and it seems likely that the American attachment to circumcision is going to need a different kind of solution than, say, the Kikuyu attachment to female genital surgery.
It seems to me that the salient arguments to use with gentile Americans about male circumcision are:
1) Your son will be in terrible, unrelieved pain. Is that the way you want to greet him in the world?
2) The claims about hygiene are false. Circumcision will not make your son cleaner.
3) Circumcision will not substantially protect your son from AIDS. Condoms are a better solution.
I don’t know how to deal with male circumcision as a marker in American Jewish populations… I imagine reform populations (in general) will be responsive to many of the same arguments that genitiles are. But Jewish circumcision of infant males, particularly Ashkenazic Jewish circumcision in the wake of the Holocaust, has some similar entanglements with cultural imperialism that pan-Africanism has with female genital surgeries. It becomes a way of proving genuine Africanism, genuine Jewishness, and rejecting colonialist impositions on self and culture.
Nazis identified Jews by circumcised penises, and killed people they found with them. Some Jews justify circumcision because they are defying the Nazis.
Pan-Africanism has sometimes trended toward supporting female genital surgeries precisely because colonialists tried absolutist methods of stamping it out. (This posed female genital mutilation as African and refraining from surgery as western. Some groups that want to ally themselves with pan-Africanism have adopted female genital surgeries in the past century for this reason.)
I thought the outcry that I saw about the AAP recommendation was stupid and poorly researched. Again, I don’t know whether that recommendation would work in the context of the United States (or France or the UK) where people who practice female genital surgeries generally occupy somewhat isolated immigrant communities. But in the absence of research, it is not a totally wild assumption that practices which worked in other regions might work here. The kneejerk “it must be bad!” reaction seemed predicated mostly on ignorance of how beneficial similar protocols have been internationally.
Mandolin: I’ve mostly seen an absolute stance against FGM on feminists blog and that’s why I asked you to clarify in case I misunderstood you. Thank you for taking the time to clarify your position so eloquently.
I understand your arguments and although I argue from a point of principle and you from an pragmatic point we seem to agree on the baseline, both FGM and MGM is bad and should ideally be totally abolished.
To return, for a moment, to the antisemitism of Foreskin Man (which does not mean that I think the conversation between Mandolin and Tamen was a derail): One of the things I found most disturbing was the “Monster Mohel” performs circumcision using “metzitzah b’peh”, the practice by which the mohel sucks the blood from the wound he has just inflicted on the infant’s penis. Metzitzah is discussed in the Talmud as a hygienic practice–which, given the medical understanding of the time might have been entirely reasonable–and it is not the standard practice today among mohels, except perhaps among the Chasidim, and Jewish/rabbinical institutions have taken positions advocating that metzitzah be practiced using a sterile glass tube so that there is no direct oral-genital contact.
Why do I find the way Foreskin Man protrays this as disturbing? First, because, as far as I have been able to tell, there is no blessing connected with metzitzah and so the way the comic has Monster Mohel recite a blessing suggests that within the rite of circumcision the sucking on a boy’s penis by a man is considered a holy act in itself–almost a sacred sexual act–which perpetuates the antisemitic trope of the Jew as sexually perverse, immoral, diseased, etc. As well, the fact that metzitzah specifically involves the boy’s blood cannot help but mean that the portrayal in Foreskin Man contains echoes of the blood libel. And, finally, Foreskin Man here conjures here very explicitly the connection that was made in 19th century Europe between circumcision and the transmission of disease, specifically syphilis, a connection that was used extensively in antisemitic literature to prove the diseased nature of the Jew. Sander Gilman deals with this subject at some length in his book, The Jew’s Body
RJN at 15 is entirely correct. The berachah that the mohel recites for the circumcision itself is also wrong (although it simply uses incorrect words). It’s also weird to see him hold up a book labeled “Barukh” (?! wtf is that supposed to be) before the brit, when clearly both the gesture and the style of the book are out of some cariacturisation of Christian pastors and their Bible.
And none of the Jews have used Jewish names (although Glick is a surname). I think the bad guys’ ones were picked to sound scary and foreign.
And the brit is not done on a table and the guests are not usually shooed out but gathered in and what is with all those religious Jewish men touching the scantily clad woman and in short just what the hell IS this comic.
Plus I loved how the evil Jewy husband had darker skin than the wife.
Something I really hate is how little all the mistakes, ignorance, and laziness of the author will ever matter. He doesn’t know a thing about Judaism, but he doesn’t need to inorder to slander effectively.
When I read the 1st issue, I emailed the writer with a request that Foreskin Man widen his field of action to protect girls as well. He said he had plans of that sort down the road. I also asked him to include some women that weren’t stretched out/pinched in/ puffed up beyond belief, but he had no comment about that.
It’s almost funny how the face of one villain ended up on that cup in the second panel you showed us.
Someone else, I forget who or where, had the best comment of all. Instead of a cape, an anticircumcision superhero ought to wear a hood.
I wonder what his motto would be? “Foreskin Man – always coming when you need him!”
@Yonah: Sarah is not a Jewish name?? Some of the guests are also presumably Jewish, but not stereotypical. It’s telling that (for that reason?) you don’t acknowledge them. They were driven out because they were expecting a Brit Shalom and there is no sendak for the same reason.
@RJN: Hasidic mohelim in New York insist on performing metzitzah b’peh to this day, despite three boys contracting herpes from it and one dying, and Mayor Bloomberg bowed to them. Clearly they think it is an integral and sacred part of the ceremony. It is hardly unreasonable to begin with the worst version of something you are attacking. (PETA doesn’t trash entomologists’ laboratories.) But I think Hess pulled his punch by not translating the expression, let alone showing the act.
It’s only anti-circumcision, with a whole slew of traditional comic-strip stereotypes, some used ironically. Hess overestimated your sophisitcation.
Wow.
Yeah… I’m very anti-circ, but wtf? I already have enough people who think I’m antisemitic just for being anti-circ. Dammit.
This comic reminds me of how I feel about PETA: good goals… eh… not so good methods. And not something I want to be associated with.
Huh. None of the women are villains, either.
Pedestalizing, much?
Hugh7:
Yes, I know, but they are neither the majority of Jews nor the majority of mohelim, which was my point–and which I do not say is somehow ameliorating of the fact that brit milah is a form of routine infant male circumcision–as was the fact of the inaccuracy of way in which metzitzah b’peh is portrayed. I did not say there is nothing wrong with the practice. More to the point, though, the fact of Hess’ ironic intent–and I will grant you that his intent was ironic only because I don’t want to think he was intentionally being as antisemitic as the comic is–does not mean his attempt at irony worked. Whatever else may be true about Jewish male circumcision, Foreskin Man provides no argument against it, ironic or otherwise; the antisemitism of the portrayal is opportunistic and gratuitous.
Cessen, yeah, I was wondering about that, too (women in the comic)…
A swimming pool with no shallow end; a mother with a dangerous head wound who will wake up to find her baby missing…couldn’t the activists have taken her along or something? At least the woman on the motorcycle was appealing.
The rest of you have articulated well the problems with this comic. I kept hoping its quality would improve so that I could stay interested enough to read the origin story–how’d he get that batcave, and so forth.
The first issue seemed to shift neatly between two parallel worlds, a present like we know and a near future where no child could be cut. I get the feeling that the author doesn’t quite have it all together yet, and don’t know if it will start to cohere, both in logical sense and in avoiding sexism, antisemitism and other bad isms.
But I must say that having it end with an empty seascape somehow pleased me.
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@Elusis:
You’re just being ironic, right? And who told you this was written by an MRA?
“The routine circumcision of infant boys, medical and otherwise, is a problem. Somehow I can’t see a comic like this being the way to address it.”
I agree with both sentences.
I participate in a lot of anti-circumcision discussions in social media. I am pleased to report that in threads I read, Foreskin Man is very much ignored. The typical intactivist is a suburban mother of childbearing age. People like that are not attracted at all to cartoon caricature as a form of persuasion. I share their disdain.